My videos are produced using free & open source software. All of it! No ‘photoshop’; no ‘final cut’ or ‘premiere’; not a Mac in sight! Just a (free) Linux platform, running on a years-old recycled computer, with various free audio, video, and graphical editing programs – all coming together to produce these videos.
The problem with using free software is that it doesn’t include all the bells and whistles of the ‘paid for’ products; and getting increasingly annoyed with the limitations of that, I spent much of the last few weeks writing a couple of computer programs to fill that void.
Anyhow, listening to some political podcasts while I worked on this, I started to think about Mario Savio’s speech in December 1964:
“The answer we received, from a well-meaning liberal, was the following: He said, ‘Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his board of directors?’ That’s the answer! Well, I ask you to consider: If this is a firm, and if the board of regents are the board of directors; and if President Kerr in fact is the manager; then I’ll tell you something. The faculty are a bunch of employees, and we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be – have any process upon us. Don’t mean to be made into any product. Don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organised labour, be they anyone! We’re human beings!”
Now, you’ll notice that this video has some animated screen-shots which translucently drift over the screen. These have been generated by my new computer program. What I’ve created is a ‘virtual’ rostrum camera: I can take an image, and rather than have it static on the screen, I can pan, zoom, and rotate it. Likewise, the 4:3 aspect ratio was also deliberately chosen to be ‘difficult’, as I need to check this new system can depart from the standard ‘letterbox’ of the 16:9 standard display monitor.
A minimal effect, but one that creates a far more dynamic flow in the scene. I’d been meaning to write these programs for a while, but the only time I get ‘time out’ these days to do such intensive work is at Christmas and New Year.
The greatest obstacle to producing them, though, was the need to engage with ‘The Machine’: The computer platform; the code; and to make myself think like a machine in order to code. As Savio says:
“The operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
I find programming really easy. ‘I could have been a programmer’, but thankfully I realised the psychological toll of that occupation and went, happily, into engineering instead.
The thing is, understanding the everyday technology around me, and having to interact with it, also brings with it a heavy toll: I never bought into the ‘dream’ of the technological lifestyle... “I did far too much backpacking in my youth”, as I often say; and as society has been funnelled down an increasingly controlling and exploitative system of technological manipulation, so I’ve found my technical knowledge not being used to engage with that, but to insulate myself from it.
Of course, most people don’t think like that – and even if they did, many don’t have the technical skills to manipulate the technology around them in order to create a situation that fits their desires, not the dictates of creating these exploitative technologies. The seeming result of that process for most ‘average’ people is summarised in that infamous meme:
“This is fine. I’m OK with the events that are unfolding currently. That’s OK. Things are gonna be OK.”
I don’t know if it was having to engage with ‘The Machine’ whilst programming, but in the last few days I’ve had a strange, heavy piece of music in my head. And, because of the power of free and open source software, and the Linux operating system, you can now listen to that – transcribed from my mind, with it’s 7/4-time delayed and reverberated strangeness, into reproducible sound.
In many ways, it’s like the discussion from ‘Matrix Reloaded’ I referenced in my recent John Zerzan video:
“I like to be reminded this city survives because of these machines. These machines are keeping us alive while other machines are coming to kill us. Interesting isn’t it. The power to give life, and the power to end it.”
Here we are then. The fact you can watch this new video, with both the sound and visual ideas in my head reproduced on ‘The Machine’, demonstrates that my recent exertions have met with success: My new bespoke graphical compositing programs work; my new hardware set-up works to capture and record my ideas as I wish to express them; my now massive collection of free video stock footage and public domain works (which is what the video is created from), which I spent much of 2022 compiling, is now organised; and now that’s complete, I can get on and use all this to make some new, really ‘heavy’ content in 2023!
Of course, as I imply above, this year is going to feature some heavy criticism not just of technology, but of the people who believe technology can ‘save us’. I’ve been trying to say that for a while; but the technology itself was an obstacle to that. I had to get my own, ‘technological being’, stripped down and functioning to accentuate my specific creative needs, to say that highly complex and controversial message as I desired.
Or as Mario Savio most eloquently said: “And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”